Fair Maiden
Published Sun, Jan 10, 2010 02:00 AM
Modified Fri, Jan 08, 2010 01:59 PM
He's 68. She's 16. Oates spins a suspect seduction
As writers of serious fiction go, no one is more prolific than Joyce Carol Oates.
Writing in The New Yorker, the late John Updike said of Oates, “Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy; if the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.” He added, “Her short stories seem to be everywhere,” “Her poems are being readied for a collected edition,” “Her criticism is generous and wide-ranging.”
Updike wrote that more than 20 years ago. Since then, Oates has more than doubled her novelistic output (a mere 18 in 1987) and collected her ubiquitous stories in about 20 more volumes. She has written seven more novellas, better than a dozen more plays, a half-dozen books of essays and criticism, and two more poetry collections. She has dabbled in young adult and children's fiction - if you define writing seven books as dabbling. She probably finished another novel in the time it took me to write this review.
It's a fairy tale
Her latest novella, “A Fair Maiden,” is a two-part gothic fairy tale about 68-year-old Marcus Kidder's love for 16-year-old Katya Spivak. This romance will be off-putting to some readers. Some will interpret Kidder's seduction of Katya as rape; others will contend nothing happened. Oates handles this sort of volatile material well, and, if Kidder is to be believed, he and Katya are “soul mates.”
Not a beautiful girl, Katya, from working-class Vineland, N.J., is the daughter of an absent gambling father and a drunken whoring mother. She has landed a summer job, playing nanny for a well-to-do but stingy couple in posh Bayhead Harbor. There, with the children in the park, Katya meets Kidder, who invites her home.
A tall, debonair sexagenarian, Kidder is an artist, a pianist, a composer and a children's book author. Acting on her father's maxim, Katya “lets the dice decide” and goes to visit the old man in his spacious oceanfront property that's worth millions.
Thereafter, Kidder begins his seduction of Katya, a girl who is a stand-in for a lost love from his youth. Elements of fairy tales permeate the story: Kidder's house is like an “illustration in a children's story book set once upon a time”; not only is there “a magic in the house,” Kidder's piano playing is “magical.” He even talks to her as if they are in a fairy tale: “I have a mission for you, I think. If you are indeed the one,” he tells her. “A fair maiden - to be entrusted with a crucial task. For which she will be handsomely rewarded in time.” He even recites a fairy tale to her.
Oates depicts Katya not only as a sharp-minded teenager who has been around the block, done some drugs and realizes that Kidder wants her, but also as a child who subconsciously is enamored of fairy tales.
I won't reveal the “crucial task” Katya is asked to perform, but it's certain to ignite as much debate as the rape/seduction dispute. Joseph Peschel is a freelance writer and critic. His Web site is josephpeschel.com.